This is the 54th imaging session of 2024 in the Serenity Observatory at SCGO.
This mornings three imaging runs of Jupiter occurred in nice warm 15C weather but with a wicked wind of 7kph gusting to 20kph.
It was supposed to be over 50% cloud but we got lucky with a clear hole in the clouds for an hours or so.
Today is also the first foray into more advanced image processing.
So far we acquire a video file of thousands of ms exposure frames, open that in Autostakkert! v4 which sorts them by quality and aligns and stacks them. We generally go with the best 5% or 10% of 15K frames.
Then we take that output and put it into Registax for wavelet processing and RGB colour balance. We get a much sharper image out of that process.
Today I downloaded Gimp 2.10.38 (a free image processing program similar to photoshop) and brought the images (.png format) in one by one and applied some very basic operations on them:
1) colors, levels, black drop, applied to the background and then to the faint processing artifacts of a light ring around the planet. It disappears.
2) colors, saturation, scale up to x1.5
3) filters, enhance, unsharp mask, scale up to x1
export as .png
THe first image on the left is the “regular” autostakkert and registax output. The 2nd image, on the right, is the GIMP enhanced version.
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I can certainly see a difference in the two and consider the GIMP enhanced one a value added image. However there is sooo much more to learn now!